Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal? [LWN.net]

Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?

Posted Aug 4, 2003 9:34 UTC (Mon) by mmutz (subscriber, #5642)
Parent article: UCITA goes down

Let's play devil's advocate here: Isn't the GPL (and other FSS licenses) also a shrink-warp
license in that you need to download the software and unpack the tarball in order to look
at the source and see that it's GPL? Or (if you run pre-compiled binaries) start the software
and go to Help->About Foo to see which license it's under? Wasn't UCITA meant to
legalize exactly this kind of thing? Doesn't this mean that Free Software projects now
need to display the license information and obtain the agreement of the user _prior_ to
allowing the download?

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Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?

Posted Aug 4, 2003 10:59 UTC (Mon) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

Not at all... Unlike the typical shrink-wrap EULA, the GPL (and other
open source licenses) does not attempt to take any of your normal rights
away from you... The GPL is simply a looser form of standard copyright...
Copyright is well-established, and needs no licensing agreement to be
valid... The things it takes away from you (right to copy) are well
understood and widely known... Now, all the GPL does is say, "Under
certain conditions, I'll waive the standard copyright restrictions for
you, if you agree to abide by these terms"... And, the only person it
applies to is one who does the copying/distribution of the software, not
anyone who simply uses it... There are absolutely NO usage restrictions
involved with GPL software; there are with standard shrink-wrap EULA...
So, no, users don't need to agree to anything to use GPL software... They
are always free to use it, as they wish... It's only if they become
developers/distributors of the software that they need to agree to the GPL
terms in order to take advantage of its waiver of standard copyright
restrictions (which would otherwise prevent them from distributing copies
of the software)... And, if they choose NOT to agree to the GPL terms,
well then all they have to fall back on is standard copyright; which, as I
say, would prevent them from distributing the software...

Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?

Posted Aug 5, 2003 8:02 UTC (Tue) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

Let's play devil's advocate here: Isn't the GPL (and other FSS licenses) also a shrink-warp license.

Quite simply: no.

The difference is that you are NOT required to agree to the terms of the GPL to use software under the GPL. That is, it is perfectly allowed to download software under the GPL, refuse to agree to any of the terms in the GPL, and still install and use the software.

If you refuse to agree to the GPL, then you are bound by the terms of normal copyrigth. This means that you could not redistribute or copy the software. Not because of anything in the GPL, but because normal standard copyrigth forbids these actions.

The GPL itself makes all of this painfully clear if you only bother to read it.